With Paper Wings
by icepixel
Summary: Michael and Susan are pressed into babysitting duty and while ostensibly talking about the past and present, wind up having a conversation about the future.  Fluff.   Though of course with them, there's always angst lurking in the corners...  CI 'verse.


One of the many things I like about this pairing is that some of the gender expectations are swapped: Susan is often the more practical one, while Michael, though he keeps it under wraps, is more traditionally romantic/sentimental (c.f. Dodger in "GROPOS"). This is the first fic in my AU from Michael's POV, something I've been wanting to do for a while, and it was fun to play with that here.

This is set about six months after "The Backstreets of Heaven" and two months before "A Heart for a Compass (Or, A Proposal, The Modesty of Which Is Irrelevant)."

* * *

On a Saturday afternoon about a month after his birthday, Michael Garibaldi answered his doorchime completely innocent of the disruption about to be visited on him in the form of a four-year-old boy.

"Michael, _please_," Zack entreated. "It'll just be for a few hours. I've gotta get these evaluations done or Ivanova'll have my hide; you of all people should know how much of a stickler for punctuality she is. I don't have anyone else to ask."

He did, in fact, know exactly the kind of grief Zack would get if he was late with the yearly performance evaluations of his subordinates. He even sympathized. But _babysitting_?

He sighed. He was a sucker where his people were concerned, and even though he was no longer Zack's superior officer, they'd worked together long enough that Zack would always be one of his. "All right. But four hours is my limit; after that, I'm bringing him by your office and leaving him there whether you're done or not."

"Thank you," Zack said, looking terribly relieved. "I owe you one."

"Da"—oops, better not say that—"darn tootin'."

Zack looked down at the kid, who was staring at them both a little too angelically to be entirely innocent. "Elliot, be good for Michael, okay?"

"Okay, Uncle Zack."

With another thank you to Michael, Zack quickly left the room, leaving babysitter and babysat to size each other up.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, Susan linked in and asked if he wanted to watch a vid or something together.

He looked at the small tornado currently running around his quarters pretending he was Superman. "I'd love to, but I can't. I'm babysitting."

He practically heard her eyebrow raise over the comm channel. "What?"

"Zack's nephew is visiting; his sister's on a business trip or something like that. He had to go in for a while and finish up some evals. Apparently I was the only patsy he could find on short notice."

Something that definitely sounded like snickering was audible over the link. Morosely watching Elliot climb on the bed and start jumping, he said, "Anyway, I'll have to take a rain check."

Susan managed to regain control of herself. He expected her to say she'd see him later, but instead she told him, "I'll be there in five minutes."

"Uh...you do know what 'rain check' means, right?"

That was definitely a snort. "You're babysitting. This I _have_ to see."

True to her word, she was there in five minutes. He'd just managed to get Elliot off his bed and was trying to interest him in the pad of drawing paper Zack had left him with, but the kid wasn't having any of it.

Susan raised an eyebrow as Elliot started running around again, yelling about how he was going to start flying any minute now. "For the sake of your neighbors," she said, "I think a trip to the park might be in order."

By dividing and conquering, they managed to corner Elliot and get him to stop moving for two seconds. Michael took his hand in an iron grip—no way was he letting the kid escape somewhere on the station—and started to march them toward the door.

Of course, _now_ he refused to be separated from his drawing paper, and he tugged ineffectively on Michael's hand, trying to reach it. Susan grabbed the pad, with its marker attached by a dirty loop of string, and handed it to him, which thankfully ceased his whining. That taken care of, they headed for Green Sector.

* * *

Though EarthForce designers had given Babylon 5 three gardens, a baseball diamond, several grassy fields, a hedge maze, and even a small clump of trees, they hadn't thought to put in anything as useful for a bored kid as a playground. Although Elliot seemed to appreciate the chance to run around in one of the fields claiming to be Superman again, especially when Michael pretended to be the villainous Lex Luthor and chased him, they quickly found themselves in need of something to hold his interest.

Susan tore a piece of paper from the thick drawing pad laying beside them on the bench they'd claimed and began folding it briskly. "What are you doing?" Elliot asked, standing in front of her.

"You'll see," she said, continuing to fold. With another few creases, the paper airplane was done.

"What is it?" the child asked.

"You've never seen one of these before?" He shook his head, and she glanced at Michael, shaking hers as well. "Kids these days," she muttered, and he bit back a laugh.

"It's a paper airplane. It can fly," she explained, to predictable glee from Elliot. She placed it in his hand and positioned his fingers around the thin strip of paper at the bottom, keeping her own hand around his to better steer the flight. "Now we throw it."

Though Elliot's short stature meant they were only starting about three feet off the ground, the airplane flew a remarkable distance. Elliot clapped his hands delightedly as it soared.

"Impressive," Michael said.

"It's all in the wrist. My father taught me that," she replied. Though the memory of a conversation he was never supposed to see came immediately to his mind, she seemed to be thinking only of happier times.

Elliot asked if they could watch the plane fly again. "Bring it back and we'll throw it some more," she said, and the kid shot off across the grass.

The third time she did this, Michael leaned over and said, "You realize this looks remarkably like a dog playing fetch with a tennis ball, right?"

"You can thank me any time for burning off some of his energy," she replied, and he had to admit she had a point there.

Elliot eventually either caught on to what she was doing or just finally got tired, because after the sixth trip across the field, he stopped in front of them, staring critically at the much-battered plane. "How come this can fly and I can't?"

Michael shrugged at Susan's panicked glance. He might have been the official babysitter, but she'd started the paper airplane business; as far as he was concerned, this one was all hers.

"Well," she said slowly, "for one, this station generates a kind of artificial gravity by rotation, and you're a lot heavier than a piece of paper when gravity's involved. Also, paper wings make a better airfoil than human arms..."

And then she was explaining Newton's laws and Bernoulli's Principle to a freaking four-year-old. There was no way this kid was understanding even the simplified terms she was using, but he was interested in the different paper airplanes she was making to illustrate various parts of her explanation. Michael watched them throw the planes, which soared or crashed depending on how aerodynamically Susan had folded them, with what he knew was a ridiculous grin, but it was one he couldn't seem to wipe off his face.

By the time she finished her demonstration and the three of them had picked up the planes littering the grass, Elliot was visibly flagging. Naptime, they surmised, and shepherded him back to Michael's quarters. He had to admit that he hoped the kid would drop off quickly, leaving him and Susan some time alone with each other.

"I'm not tired!" Elliot exclaimed when Michael sat him on the bed and pulled off his shoes.

"Sorry, pal, but you can barely keep your eyes open."

"Can too," he protested, widening his eyes until they practically popped out of his head.

"Has anyone told you all the horrible, painful things sleep deprivation can do to you?" Susan asked.

Michael snorted at Elliot's confused face. Yeah, that wasn't going to work this time. She might be fond of logic, but he knew when it was time to resort to good old-fashioned bribery. "Elliot," he said, "if you go to sleep right now, without any more complaining, I see ice cream after dinner in your future."

Amazing what the promise of sugar could do. He'd have to apologize to Zack for making him feed the kid dessert and then deal with the ensuing sugar rush, but he couldn't bring himself to feel too badly about it.

With Elliot safely stretched out on the bed and pretending to snore, he and Susan retreated to the living area. Sitting beside her on the couch, he said, "Thanks for sticking around. I don't think I could've entertained him half as well as you did."

She smiled and nudged his shoulder. "You would've done all right." They sat silently for a moment before she said, "It was kind of nice watching him. He's so..." She seemed to be searching for the right word. "He has no idea about all the horrors out there, or all the ways things could've gone so terribly wrong over the past few years. He probably wasn't even talking when the Shadows and the Vorlons went beyond the Rim." His stomach clenched, as it always did when he was reminded of that year. The memories were slowly becoming less painful, but the sharp edge would never fully dull.

Susan seemed to be going somewhere with this conversation, and he wondered for a moment where that was. "Those where such difficult years, but this kid, and Ensign Maxwell's children, and soon John and Delenn's baby, they remind us that all the hell we went through, all the sacrifices we made"—here he knew with absolute certainty that she was thinking of Marcus Cole—"at least they weren't for nothing. We helped give them a better universe."

As a security chief and now the head of covert ops for the Interstellar Alliance, Michael prided himself on being able to read between the lines of just about any conversation. There was a whole book to be found between the lines of what Susan had said, and definitely a question being asked.

Having kids wasn't something he'd given much thought to. He liked them in the abstract, though aside from today, his concrete experience with them was minimal; he was an only child, so there were no nephews or nieces, and he'd never been particularly close to his extended family. The only kid he'd ever spent much time with had been Lianna, and while he'd liked being her Uncle Mike while Frank was alive and he was sober, that had hardly turned out for the best in the end.

He'd long ago come to the conclusion that procreation wasn't something he desperately needed to do. But there had always been the faint hope that with the right person, at the right time—

He'd known for two years that if the right person existed, she was sitting next to him. The right time wasn't quite here, because he wanted her to himself for a while longer, but someday soon...

"We did," he said. "All of them, and all the ones to come." He met her gaze. Question answered.

That night, lying spooned against her in a bed that was quickly becoming not so much hers as theirs, he dreamed of children with Susan's eyes and his mouth, her hair and his nose, or maybe the other way around. _Someday soon_, he promised, still dreaming, and held Susan closer as they slept.


End file.
